A priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a room. It may sound like the beginning of a joke, but it was the reality at this year’s G20 Interfaith Forum (IF20) in Salt Lake City, Utah. Add several hundred more religious leaders, development practitioners, policymakers, scholars, and civil society leaders, and you get a picture of this year’s forum, entitled “Resilient Hope, Shared Future.”
For twelve years now, the IF20 has brought together representatives of religious communities and faith-based organizations, scholars, and policymakers to discuss the G20 agenda and pressing issues facing the world’s poor and marginalized communities. With the U.S. presidency of the G20 centering on economic growth, a focus on the vulnerable was more important than ever. An overarching theme of this year’s conference, which ran from October 15 and 17, was the importance of civil discourse across difference. In a public session before the start of the forum, Governor of Utah Spencer Cox, former Governor of South Carolina and World Food Programme Director David Beasley, and Martin Luther King III reflected on the concept of “disagreeing better” in a time of acute political polarization. Katherine Marshall reiterated this theme during her opening remarks and throughout the three days, speakers emphasized the vital role of faith communities to foster unity without denying differences.
Speakers likewise stressed the importance of ensuring a healthy dynamic between religion and politics. During a plenary session on energy security, Dr. Azza Karam, President of Lead Integrity, called on faith institutions to denounce religious nationalism, warning that “we’re hearing religious politics and political religion far more often than we’re hearing a prophetic voice for the common good.” In a keynote address on human flourishing, Dr. Melissa Rogers, former Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership, spoke against promoting the freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) to exclusively benefit certain faith communities over others.
The future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was another major theme. At the forum’s opening ceremony hosted in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S., drew on Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, arguing that technological progress must serve the human person. In a plenary session exploring the moral dimensions of AI, Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints highlighted faith communities’ roles in teaching members about the value and limitations of AI; Gong emphasized that AI must never replace human connection and companionship. On a practical level, Ambassador Muhammadou Kah of the Republic of The Gambia called on religious and civil society representatives to collaborate with governments in formulating ethical guardrails on data and AI governance to protect individuals’ rights to privacy.
Another key focus area was care for the vulnerable, a central teaching for the world’s religious traditions. Panels on poverty and hunger, human trafficking, gender-based violence, children’s rights, mental health, and clubfoot all reflected this concern. Speakers and audience members highlighted the many ways in which people of faith and religious institutions serve marginalized people around the world, leveraging high levels of community trust, familiarity with local needs, and intra- and interreligious networks. At the same time, faith groups can be powerful advocates for policy change on such topics as debt relief, food assistance, anti-trafficking, and climate policy.
At the heart of the IF20 is the belief that faith leaders and representatives should have a seat at the table in shaping and implementing interventions and policies on the local, national, and global governance systems. Across the forums, participants called for greater collaboration between faith communities and organizations, development actors, and governments on a variety of issues, including pandemic prevention, disaster early-warning systems, peacebuilding initiatives, energy transition planning, and AI governance. Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, called on faith communities to engage policymakers with specific, action-focused proposals to catalyze economic growth and community well-being. The challenge is building collaborations based on genuine partnership and shared decision-making and accounting for the needs of the most vulnerable.
True to the conference’s name, hope was a constant theme. Faith leaders framed hope as a religious duty, a commitment to a future that we may not see ourselves but that we must nevertheless build in the present. These themes carried into the closing ceremony at Salt Lake City’s Catholic Cathedral of the Madeleine. The program featured choral music, intergenerational dialogue, and several speeches reflecting upon the connections forged over the past days and looking ahead to next year’s IF20 in the United Kingdom. The London-based conference plans to focus on poverty and inequality, environmental stewardship, and fostering cohesion in a divided world. Until then, the impact of the discussions held in Salt Lake City will be measured on the ground: in houses of worship, civic spaces, and decision-making spaces.
For an overview of the forum, including press releases from the opening and closing ceremonies and individual sessions, visit the G20 Interfaith Forum event page.
Luisa Banchoff served as a research and report writer for the World Faiths Development Dialogue. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a B.A. in religion and earned a master's degree in social anthropology from the London School of Economics.
